Hypnosis Hastings NE

Prescription: Hypnosis

Provided by: 

Hypnosis may have a role to play in the operating room. So says Sebastian Schulz-Stubner, an anesthesiologist at the University of Iowa, who recently gave 48 patients clinical hypnosis instead of sedating drugs for surgeries that required regional anesthesia.

Typically, patients undergoing such procedures—knee arthroscopies, fracture settings, hernia repairs—receive a sedating drug such as Valium in addition to the anesthesia so they won’t be 100 percent aware of scalpels cutting into flesh or knives digging into joints. But people who are allergic to such medication or have conditions like sleep apnea, in which the airways can close down, may have trouble with the Valium. Schulz-Stubner thought hypnosis might work instead and decided to give it a try.The 36 patients who had come in for elective surgery were all successfully hypnotized. Of those, 80 percent remembered nothing about the procedure; 10 percent remembered sensations of warmth and heaviness, and the rest recalled only vague images.

Only 2 of 12 emergency cases were successful, however. “When we had time to familiarize people with the idea and explain what was going to happen, it worked,” says Schulz-Stubner. But in the emergency room, where people were still trying to adjust to the idea of being there at all, they were less likely to warm to the idea. “When I held a finger to their faces and told them to focus, they probably thought, ‘What the hell is he doing?’”

Copyright 1999-2009 Natural Solutions: Vibrant Health, Balanced Living/Alternative Medicine/InnoVisi...

Click here to read more from Natural Solutions